Edgar Wright, the British director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, is in talks to direct Johnny Depp in The Night Stalker, a big-screen transfer for the 1970s TV show about a newspaper reporter who investigates supernatural occurrences, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Depp would play the main role of journalist Carl Kolchak. The original television series, titled Kolchak: The Night Stalker, ran for one season between 1974 and 1975 on the ABC network in the US and was preceded by two television movies. A revival, titled simply Night Stalker, ran for six weeks in autumn 2005, once again on ABC, with Stuart Townsend playing the lead. The show is often credited as an inspiration for the longer running and considerably more popular The X-Files. The imdb.com entry for the original series states that it was shown on British television in 1983, though it does not say on which station.

Wright's involvement comes at a time when the film-maker's Hollywood career behind the cameras had appeared to have stalled. The co-creator of cult Brit TV series Spaced most recently co-wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn but has not directed a film since the box-office failure of 2010 comic-book tale Scott Pilgrim vs the World. He is still hoping to get his big-screen outing for Marvel Comics superhero Ant-Man off the ground and reportedly turned in a third draft of the script, written with Tintin collaborator and Attach the Block director Joe Cornish, in July last year to Marvel Studios. The Night Stalker is being put together at Disney, which owns Marvel, so Wright's involvement could be part of a deal to get both films made, the Hollywood Reporter speculates.